Boisea Trivittata

For three years my brother and I shared a room until my parents finished the basement to our house, carpeted over the smooth concrete floor, wallpapered over the sheetrock where we would draw our own bull’s-eyes and practice throwing steak knives into the faded rock wall. Our bedroom was the only room in the basement that didn’t have columns of boxed up holiday decorations, old quilts, new quilts we weren’t allowed to use, wreaths for every season, greasy bike or car parts, canvas bags stained white from lime full of mason’s tools, and anything my mom’s sisters claimed they couldn’t fit in their homes. Our home became a monthly depository for my mom’s sisters where they would drop off and pick up boxes depending on the time of year, borrowing decorations and ornaments, arguing over what my grandmother really intended each daughter to own.
Tony and I didn’t mind. We had our bedroom and my mom made it very clear our space was to be left alone. We had two twin beds that sat at opposite corners of the room, a six-drawer bank dresser at the head of my bed and the closet at the head of Tony’s. Our beds didn’t have head or footboards, just a rectangle frame with wheels that would slide across the floor, crashing the box springs and mattress into the wall when we would jump from bed to bed.
At night we would stay up playing, “Guess What I’m Thinking”. My little brother would try to read my mind given a few indiscrete clues I’d reveal if he got too frustrated. The idea to be guessed was always something generic like bike riding, hitting a baseball, imagining a new dog; a list of fifteen or so reoccurring thoughts, like playing Twenty Questions with a flipbook.
During the summer our room in the basement would swelter with our hot breath and we would open the window. The neighbor, Mr. Devonshire, played music on his front porch from an old tube portable until late in the evening. His front yard was shrouded in fruit trees, cherry, apricot, apple, two adult box elders and a blue spruce that shone in the sunlight like the morning sky before a storm. Mr. D. and his son Peter lived in a small, white house; nestled among the trees it looked like a painting in a cheap hotel, cozy and desperate. I only went in the house twice. Once, I dropped off a plate of Christmas cookies for my mom when Mr. D invited me in. The wood floor was worn gray under the kitchen table and the rug in the kitchen was pocked with grease and food stains. The other time my father helped Mr. D carry a wooden Indian into his living room. I followed, tried to move the futon from the corner where the Indian was intended to go. Mr. D saw I couldn’t move the couch alone and tried to slide it with his thigh. When he pushed it too hard, lost his balance, the Indian twirled like it was dancing and my father lost his grip, dropped the wooden figure. The Indian’s elbow, arms folded as if in a white man’s prayer, drove through and splintered the worn wood floor.
Peter D, the name I gave him, which progressed quickly to Peter Dunce, Peter Dink, Peter Dick at school, was the only kid on the block without a mom. My brother, Tony, and I would lie awake at night and talk about what life would be like without a mother, without rule and restriction. Peter never had to do yard work. We never saw him mowing the lawn, weeding around the base of the trees where Mr. D’s weathered roses barely stood vertical on their brown stalks. Peter D never had to help pick fruit from any of the trees out front, which Mr. D would gather into plastic crates lined with newspaper and sell for cheap on Saturdays. On Saturdays Tony and I had a list of weekly chores my mom would give to us; we equated Peter D’s exemption from chores with his lack of a mother.
Because of this slight envy, and because everyone in the neighborhood thought Peter D was a pussy, he was picked on regularly. Peter D was needy. You could smell it on him like a dog would. His desperation for friendship was only matched by his ability to provide dangerous and rebellious activities for the neighborhood boys, things our own parents would never let us do. When we were real young Peter D was just a figure around town, the dingy kid that didn’t shower, poor, who could run on concrete without shoes. Then, one summer when I was eight, Peter D had an accident.
I didn’t see it. Peter D and his dad were fighting in their driveway. We used to frequently hear Mr. Devonshire pull out of the driveway, near the sidewalk, and yell something back to Peter D like, “Shut the door,” or “Stay inside,” and then pull away. Tony was standing outside in the front yard eating half of a break-apart popsicle. Peter D was fighting with Mr. Devonshire about going with him, wanting to see his mom, one of the reasons he was known from being a pussy. Mr. D reached across the cab of the truck and shut the door, pulling Peter D to the ground, under the carriage of the pick-up. He threw the truck in gear and backed out of the driveway in a rush, bouncing over Peter D like a speed bump.
My brother watched it happen as his popsicle melted in his hand. I was inside the house, eating the other half. That night, after lights out, we kept putting out arms around each other’s chests and squeezing, trying to imagine being run over by a truck.
When Peter D got home from the hospital he wheezed when he breathed and he couldn’t pronounce his R’s. After a couple months he emerged from his bed and we saw him in his front yard on a new 4-wheeler; for weeks we called him names like Accordion Breath and imitated him choking out the letter R, “Awah you a fast wunnah? Not if I can’t bweath”. Until one afternoon when he rode his 4wheeler into our driveway and asked if we wanted to ride.
After racing up and down the block a few times Peter D asked us if we wanted to play in his backyard. He unlatched the cedar gate and unveiled a trove of illicit pastimes. He had a BB gun, a wrist rocket he found at the dump––he’d been to the dump––a plastic recurve bow, a panoply of sticks, deer antlers, and broken latticing nailed and tied together to make play swords and makeshift knives. There was a rectangle trampoline with rusty springs, the torn ribbon on the mat looked like old pantyhose. Peter D told us that after his surgery his dad told him he could have anything he wanted, that’s where the 4wheeler came from. The other items came in quick succession.

From our open window we could hear the indelible Casey Kasem working his way down from forty, the patina of rain and hard water stains on our window seemed to make the music glow. I was sweating under my white XL Hanes cotton T-shirt and shabby diminutive briefs. I soon grew to resent my infantile bedtime garb but at the time it served well to tuck my knees into and roll on the hard floor like an egg while Tony threw rolled up socks and balls of dirty laundry at me.
Tony wasn’t sleeping; I knew it. He always tried to slow his breathing to fake it, then I’d call him Peter Dwheezow and he’d bust up laughing. It was summer and the heat made us restless. We came to the logic early in life that if there was no school the next day then there was no real need to go to sleep early. Our parent’s room was on the other side of the house so we decided to have a round of “Time Ya”. It was a game I started when Tony was young to go get me things or perform small tasks for me like shutting off the sprinklers when my dad asked. I’d ask Tony to do it and when he said no, I’d tell him I’d time him. The excitement at the chance of being watched and recorded, at impressing his older brother, was enough to set him on his mark. When Tony was a little older and the game no longer worked for small tasks we turned it into a game we could use to avoid sleep.
Each of us knew the lay of the neighborhood like a road map. We knew our favorite curbs to jump on our bikes, which sides of the houses to shortcut through where dogs wouldn’t be, the corner patch of grass in the Edgar’s where water would puddle all summer long. After a few rounds of Time Ya, we knew the Cox’s lilies were almost 130 count away, the Knight’s willow was only 45-50 but you had to swing from the thin branches, stripping a fist full of leaves on the backswing, at night the bare switches looked vulnerable and grave. I once did the Meachum mum run in under 200. Tony didn’t believe it when he saw me sprinting toward our house, thought I got spotted, but when I had a handful of chrysanthemums, my hands stained green from the swollen stems, he helped me in the window and started patting me on the back like I hit a homerun. We would hide the proof of our time under our beds and in the morning, after mom woke us and left us to get ready, we would take the evidence out back and throw the flowers over the shrubs bisecting our yard and Mr. D’s.
Tony liked to flip a coin to see who went first. It didn’t matter since we both always ran and we were going for personal bests but Tony thought it made the whole ordeal official. He grabbed my shoulders and blindly positioned us in the center of the room; the braided rug was as hard as the concrete floor beneath it.
“Alright Ladies and Gents,” he said, “come and get ‘em, step right up, for tonight only Cheetah and Whirlwind, watch ‘em race watch ‘em run.” He could go on at length in his announcer’s voice. I could see his gray figure in the light being cast from Mr. D’s front porch, his arms waving, calling to the fans in the stadium of our room. I gave him a stiff poke in the dark to wrap it up and he positioned the quarter over his thumb. He flicked the coin and it whirred in the air like a hummingbird. The quarter hit the hard carpet and we had to scour the filthy floor on our hands and knees, bumping heads and pushing one another out of the way, to find the quarter. I found it and held it in the light of the window, heads. Tony won. He got to go first.
Outside Mr. D knobbed through the stations on the radio and it sounded like a foreign language. When no other stations appealed to him he quickly turned it back to Casey Kasem. I stood on a wooden chest full of blankets and hung my head and shoulders out the window and surveyed the playing field.
The willow was out, someone on the porch smoking. Tony didn’t like the Meachum’s since it was my favorite, and I recorded such a good time. The Salisbury’s had a dog that would bark to hell if you kicked the gate but that was on the other side of the house, out of view and in front of the smoker across the street. Just as I was about to call out a rosebud from the Godfrey’s, a sleek, black car that looked ironed out of silk pulled into Mr. D’s driveway. His storm door opened and swung shut. Beyond the large shrubs between our yard, I couldn’t see who it was, couldn’t see Mr. D.
“Who is it, let me see,” Tony said.
“Hold on, there’s nothing yet.”
The car door opened and closed. A small voice said something to Mr. D, hushed by the breeze in the tree limbs and the darkening night.
Mr. D let out a big, “Ha,” and said, “you gonna aerate the lawn with those heels, darlin’?”
“Shut up and get me a drink.”
Other than the portable tube, the block went silent when the two went into the house. I tucked inside the window, crouched low with Tony and whispered, as if we were on a military mission, as if my parents could hear us.
“This one’s different, Tony. On this one, time doesn’t matter.” Tony rocked nervously, his knees tucked into his shirt made him look like a boa in a burlap sack.
“What is it? What do I have to do?”
“It’s simple, but tough.”
“Come on.”
“Easy, just change Mr. D’s radio station.”
The excitement drained from his face like an attenuating radio signal on some distant peak.
“I don’t want to do that. Can’t I just do the mums?”
“Nope, it’s a stealth mission, real secret. You’ll be fine, just hide behind the big tree and when they’re out of sight you jump up the stairs and twist the knob and run, simple.” By making the job seem casual I hoped to ease Tony’s worry.
“You do it.”
“You won the coin toss.” The technicality that Tony so enjoyed, that gave him access to some imagined adult world, was also crippling when he was forced to recognize its validity.
“If I do it you have to do it next,” he said.
“Nope. You can think of something else for me.” The great worry of going first at Time Ya is that the backlash of the first request can come back ten-fold. We kept each other honest in both the assignments and counting but Tony had yet to outdo me in the severity of the request, he was too soft, too compassionate to be menacingly creative.
I slapped the top of the wooden chest, gestured toward the window. He climbed up and steadied his body in the rectangle window like a bird on a thin branch. He reached a leg down to the gas meter in the flower garden below and disappeared into the gray night, a lucent moon lit his way.
I didn’t start counting––I didn’t have to. I turned my back and sat on the chest. I thought about my father’s gold pocket watch. My mother bought him a chain, that turned his fingers green, from a flea market in the valley. She was assured of its quality but wept when the chain broke and my father dropped it on the pavement, shattering the face into a glass spider web. I thought about spring time, cherry blossoms, the fresh grass on Mr. D’s front lawn. I thought about the time, only months after Peter D rolled over like bread dough, the vertical scar on his chest still pink and swollen, looking red hot, when he got brained by a bocce ball by a neighbor kid in his front yard. Mr. D must have seen it. As soon as he was hit, Peter D on the ground, clutching his head and chest––as if from then on all his pain would be manifest in his torso––Mr. D called from the front porch, telling him to get up, shake it off. Then I thought about Mr. D and his bow. A compound bow, camouflaged, it looked violent resting on the tailgate of his truck. He had just sighted the bow in, shooting false tips at a stack of old tires infron of his house. One of the Moffit’s chickens wandered into his fron yard and he took aim. When the arrow struck the bird there was a slight pip, a release of feathers into the air, and the bird tumbled into the fence as if it was a trick the bird had learned.
I thought about the bird and the bow, and about the watch and the blossoms. And I thought about Tony. He had been gone for some time. Casey Kasem was still droning on about the rankings of quotidian radio music.
I climbed out the window and made my way around the shrubs, under the cherry tree where I knew my heels would be painted blood-red by the fallen fruit, to the back of the silk-smooth car. I peeked around the trunk of the car and saw Tony backed against the Box Elder tree next to Mr. D’s front porch; the whitewashed walls and sickly yollew plastic awning was a disgusting scene I knew too well to be repulsed by. The radio perched on the railing glowed amber like a warning light. Tony was rubbing his arms all over his body as if in a panic. I ran up to him, kept low, out of sight.
“Hey,” he gave a start, “did you do it?”
“You scared me,” he said. “No, there’s all these stupid fire bugs.”
I didn’t notice but I too had begun habitually brushing the bugs from my legs, swatting them from my limbs.
“Let’s just do it and get out of here, this will count for both of us.”
“I don’t care about the radio, I just want to go back.”
“Come on we’re doing it.”
I got down on all fours, crept around the girth of the tree. I was about to crawl up the steps and turn the knob on the cardboard brown radio when Mr. D called out.
“Go on, get. Go listen to Kasem.”
I was behind the tree before he finished yelling and Peter D appeared on the front porch, the storm door shut behind him. He walked to the bottom of the steps and sat down, folded his arms on his knees. He looked over at us and, as if he knew we were there all along said, “Hey guys. I can’t play. My dad has a friend over.”
“We just,” I said, “We wanted to.”
“Why are you two dressed like that? You look like a couple of spooks.”
“What’s a spook?” Tony asked like we were having a conversation.
“It’s what my dad calls a ghost. You know, like Casper.”
“Yeah, Casper,” I said.
High on Peter D’s thighs were red sores evenly spaced apart, burns that bulged thick with pain. On his calf there were the healed sores of the same infliction resting like maggots on his leg. He curled over and started picking at his toenails. His feet were dirty, layers of filth that had been wetted and not wiped off. He smelled like something old and dank, like a cave after a thunderstorm. Tony spoke.
“What happened to your legs?”
“Nothing.”
“What about those scars?”
“I did that with my dad’s lighter and a broken hanger.”
“Does it hurt?”
“At first when it’s real hot.” He examined his legs like a physician, perhaps looking for something new.
“Does it hurt now?” Tony asked.
“If I tough them, see,” and he slapped his upper thigh with two fingers, winced like it wasn’t planned. “But it’s not as bad as when it’s hot.”
The thin limbs of the Box Elder tree above held a sparse cover of waxy leaves twisting in a small breeze, backlit by a waning moon. I imagined six-legged figures crawling into the window we left open, something haunting and desirous, needy and wanting our return. Tony pulled his arms into his shirt and backed away from the tree, away from Peter D and the concrete steps. If the bugs were crawling on us we didn’t brush them away.
From inside the house a chair was kicked. It sounded like a broken piano being dragged on pavement. Mr. D’s oak table was forced against the wall and a maelstrom of cheap glass breaking and hard wood being dragged erupted from the kitchen. All three of us peered through the storm door. Mr. D had his lady friend pressed against the kitchen table, kissing her hard, like their faces couldn’t come apart. Peter D looked over his shoulder once and brought his chin back to the palms of his hands. Tony and I stared, resilient to the urge to look away.
Mr. D’s hands scanned her thighs, clutched at the length of her skirt that even then I knew was too short. He grappled with her underwear and peeled them from her thin waist like something foreign and reprehensible. He spun her like a toy and pushed her, bent her over, and held a hand on her back while he fought with his belt buckle and button fly.
I pulled Tony away just as he thrust himself into her. I gathered him in my arms in front of the tree among the bugs and the hard dirt floor and the hot night. Peter D said something about a BB gun and I thought Tony might reply. I looked and his face was red, swollen, and sweating tears. I tried to push us from the tree and a dead shield of bark the size of my torso peeled away and broke off. A colony of firebugs, Box Elder bugs, Boisea trivittata spilled on our feet and shins.
The hoard was enourmous. Inescapable. As if the very surface of the tree had spawned movement.
Tony let out a single cry, a pip, and tried to run but fell into the mass of crawling life. I pulled him off the ground and we sprinted for the window and hoisted ourselves into the solace of our bedroom.
Inside we turned on the light, stripped off our shirts and tiny briefs, apathetic to each other’s exposed penises, and shook out our clothes. We crushed any falling bugs into the hard, braided carpet and quickly shut the window. I got Tony a new shirt and underwear when he refused to put the same ones on. I pulled my shirt over my head and shut out the light, slid into my coarse cotton sheets.
After a few minutes t=Tony asked me if I was still awake.
“I ain’t snoring am I?”
He limped out of bed and tip toed across the corpse-ridden floor. He pulled back my sheet without asking, crawled into my bed. I slid over to give him some room.
“Hey Nick?”
“Yeah Tone?”
“Did you step on the cherries too?”
“Yeah Tone.”
“So you think it will stain the sheets?”
“It doesn’t matter if it does.”
He didn’t talk after that. I thought about the Meachum mums and about doing the time in under 180.

Microburst

Just off the front porch the sagebrush shakes in the wind. The moon rests like a cold, white stone in a dark river; the constellations are settled on the ink-black sky. A bare light bulb sways behind me in the current of air, throwing my shadow on the desert floor, my shape gliding over the brush and sand, the sandstone boulders obscured by the night.
Heavy clouds move like a herd of horses and shroud the brilliantly lit moon. Mary steps on to the porch, the screen door crashes behind her.
“Storm comin,” she wipes her hands with a rag, “I ain’t leavin the light out again just to get broke.” She unscrews the bulb and is gone from the porch.
The landscape becomes a variegated array of black on pitch black. Suddenly, the sky erupts in sound and light. The landscape is illuminated and the mountain range in the distance is born of lightning. The ridgeline bares itself under the spires of white. Mud spills over the limestone ridges and drenches the powder floor. A torrent of water fills the dry beds and the walls of the gullies break off in chunks to join the silt and rush. The desert is a maelstrom of water, a rage of wind and wet sand.
A tin bucket brims with rainwater at the foot of the wooden porch. The wood is split wide where water has saturated and expanded under the desert sun––microbursts shatter the cracked earth, where the sun flakes the sand, a new map of desolation.
Once, when Mary and I had the horses out, the rain came quickly and pelted our skin. It took the two of us, boots slipping in the thick mud, to get the barn door closed. We laughed and kissed on the old porch, a gale of wind blew my hat high on my head. Then, like tonight, the rain brimmed over the tin pail. She looked over her shoulder at the spilling water.
“When do you think the gathering rain becomes just a bucket of water?”
I looked into the cobalt and vermillion sky, at veins of runoff winding through the valley, “I’d say about the same time the runoff becomes a river.”

First draft, bored at work, a dream I had.

The Cubes

The staggering towers of block, metal and oblique glass-like surfaces, emerged from the earth formed with quick precision, as if magma suddenly had a choice of size and contour. Physical and scientific laws Man has suffered to for an entire existence were proved invalid and unsound when the cubical figures moved up the vertical walls of the black cavern. Fear and Panic drove the actions of Man.
From the Crescent Rim through Nothern Africa, Morocco and across the Alboran, Spain and the Bay of Biscay, Celtic Sea and finally to Ireland, what we knew as Ireland, the Cubes inhabited the island. It was over the Celtic Sea where Man decided to drop the first nuke, the water is, of course, inconsequential when compared with land. After the explosion a great tidal wave crashed against the coast of Spain, Portugal, drowned the piers of the southern Irish border. The fallout caused sickness and death, radiation poisoning and hysterical vomiting in Western Europe, Iceland and Greenland. For the next ten years, rare cases of asthma developed in French-Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The World got sick. And after the explosion, the cube emerged black with soot, pristine in shape, flawless in design.
The Island was quickly lost to the cubes. Fighter jets tried desperately every type of bomb Man could conjure. In the fields where potatoes grew from dirt, and the barley stalks bent in the breeze, there now is only burnt and rotten flesh of soldiers, scorched earth, uninhabitable for Man. The cubes only secured the castles. At Carlow the walls were reconstructed, in a matter of minutes, in the bible-black night. Smaller cube reformed Ballinalacken and Carrigholt. Bunratty, Dromoland, Knappogue were the first to be usurped, the first to engender there.
At the gate of the restored and quixotic structures, the massive cubes lowered an abdominal drawbridge and in a slurry of gray mechanical hemoglobin, small Cubes the size of a man glided playfully (the only account of the beings not defined by austere, rigid movement) into the mouth of the castle. During those nascent phases of the Cube’s lives, their vulnerability was revealed.
The fighter jets and long-range missiles again persisted. Nuclear subs released heavy artillery. With each impending attack the massive Cubes would defend their progeny with minuscule shards of stone or glass, projected from an unidentifiable portion of their beings. The missiles and jets could scarcely cross the border of the Island before being discharged. Songs of thunder filled the sky. On every continent people wept.
It was a man and his son who revealed the weakness; an Irishman with eyes like the sea, and hands like worn leather. On a seventeen-foot, single prop boat the man and his son braved the blackened waters of the English channel, the torrent of waves, and the deadly coastline where the water crashed and disappeared from the limestone boulders that litter the beach. The boy and man hiked the few short kilometers to the castle where one Cube was keeping watch, dashing away rockets some ten to twelve miles away. From beyond notice of the Cube the father loaded a large, blunt construction of pvc pipe with a potato, dripped a small amount of gasoline behind the tuber, and secured a plastic screw cap with a twist-flint installed in the center. Like the two had done hundreds of times before, firing soft pots into the McCleary’s land, the boy rested the barrel on his father’s shoulder, the father said in a hushed voice, “May the enemies of Ireland never meet a friend.” And the boy twisted the flint.
A great hollow thumb sounded from the chamber the the recoil drove the flint into the boy’s shoulder. At the disturbance the Cube appeared behind the two, perhaps watching them, as the parabola of the potato peaked just over the freshly built wall. The Cube, upon the destruction the potato laid fired a panoply of varied sized shards into the boy and his father. His father, trying to save his boy, held him behind his back, his eyes cold. And the shards passed through he and the boy like they were one, singular body of liquid. Their abdomens were devoured by the speed of the shards, their shoulders pulpy and wet with sweat, slumped, up-side-down, their lips nearly touching the famous stone.
Although the actions of the man and his boy went unplanned (by military concerns), their result was witnessed by satellite coverage. Within minutes the world knew how to destroy the progeny. What was broadcasted across every channel, continuously for three days, was the potato obscured by the background of the gelatinous structures; its flight so difficult to distinguish, its aftermath would spawn religions. The potato, with what some for a millennia would call Devine Flight, sunk, like a fork into fresh pie crust, into one of the progeny at the base of a carefully stacked column. The column fell. Nearly the entire harvest of Cubes was lost; the remains of the man and boy lie out of sight.
Within hours a coterie of glory-seeking soldiers were projecting biological forms of ammunition, by every imaginable means of projection. Catapults were being built and shipped, and aeronautical engineer designed a wooden bullet that could cross the English Channel in a matter of minutes, fired from an aluminum chamber with a diameter of eighteen centimeters.
It appeared as panic, like a microwave beeping, starting, stopping. The Cubes propelled shards in all directions, unable to identify the organic matter destroying their lineage. Hours passed, daylight shimmered off the small projectiles, and someone took notice. One of the Cubes was at one time taller than the keep at Nenagh, now appeared to be shorter than the rampart. The barrage of wooden bullets and hardened roots continued.
The columns of Cubes fell, their tenuous shells cracked like eggs. The massive defenses surrounding the castles depleted, shrunk, became nothing more than a child throwing sticks. The velocity of their shards could be volleyed with a baseball bat (this game replete with religious connotations when played today, similar to a homerun one may send a great hit into Devine Flight). As the dwindling Cubes became the size of a large boulder, a child’s wagon, a soccer ball, children would hold the objects while their parents took pictures, the Cubes only able to spit shards the size of peas, which felt like a soft hail. Across the Island men were moving lumber, digging postholes and carving ashplants. One man sat on a hill, where Dublin once stood, thumbing through the pages of Ulysses. With one eye closed and his thumb sticking up, he surveyed the land, plotted the streets, and winced when he turned to the west where the sun met the nuclear, black earth.